Newsletters and email campaigns are a great way to establish rapport with potential and existing customers and improve brand loyalty.

This is because for email campaigns, you’re targeting a sort-of pre-qualified base: people who are willing to receive information from you. It’s likely that most of these people have already conducted business with you, and as we know, retaining old customers is much easier and cheaper than getting new customers.

This is why it is extremely important to conduct A/B tests if you want to try out new layouts of techniques on your email marketing campaigns.

When done correctly, email marketing can greatly improve conversion rates that will significantly raise your bottom-line especially held against other marketing efforts of similar cost. Read on to learn how to conduct a successful email campaign A/B test.

5 Essential elements of Email marketing strategies:

Deciding what to test

The first step when setting up a A/B testing protocol is making a decision on what parameters to test. You may want to test two or more things simultaneously to save time, but the best test procedures are those which measure one characteristic at a time. For instance, you may want to test the following:

Call to action phrasing

Email title/subject lines

Whether or not to include testimonials

Message layout – number of columns, placement of various elements etc.

Email greeting and personalization

Email headlines

Body texts

Closings

Presence, number and positioning of images

Specific offers

Each of the characteristics listed above has some impact on the conversion process at different stages. The call to action for instance, will directly impact the number of people that will click through to your landing page or buy your product or service.

The email title or subject line will affect the number of people who will actually open your email to begin with.

When you’re deciding which characteristics to first test, bear these differences in mind. If you’re not getting people to open your emails, you may want to begin with subject line optimization.

Start with the more important aspects (make greatest impact to conversion) working your way down. For instance, your call to action phrasing and headlines will have greater impact on conversion compared with images or body text.

Deciding your test groups

In many cases, you may want to test your entire subscriber list. This will give you a more accurate picture of the way your email subscribers respond to any new email campaign aspects. In certain instances though, it may not be prudent to test through the entire list, for instance:

When you have a large subscriber list, and the A/B testing service you’re using charges by number of addresses tested. Here, you can go for the largest sample size you can afford, selecting randomly to get the most accurate results

When you’re trying something extreme. You’ll want to limit the reach of this strategy in case it goes awry. Nonetheless, test with as many people as you can risk, a few hundred or a few thousand depending on how big a list you have.

When running limited-time offers and are looking to convert as many as possible in that time. You can first go for a small test sample, and then send the winning offer to the entire list.

In all cases, you get more accurate results by testing larger samples.

Ensure that the split is done randomly, as picking recipients from two different sources of hand-picking recipients can skew your results. Your goal is to gain insight on which version of the A/B test material works best.

Defining test success

Before sending out the email versions, you should have decided what parameter you’re testing for, and how you will measure success or lack thereof. The first step is to analyze your previous results. If you’ve been applying the same email marketing strategy for a long time, you have a sizeable data pool to look through. If you have a historic conversion rate of 10 percent, your goal might be to increase it to 15 percent for starters.

Of course, your goal for the initial A/B test might be to get more subscribers to open your emails. Here, you should look at your previous open rates, and then determine the level of improvement that you’d like to see.

If the first set of A/B tests doesn’t give you that number, try two other variations and run another test.

If your campaign management software doesn’t include tools for A/B testing, you can manually set it up. Simply divide your mailing list into two and then send each version email to each group.

You’ll have to manually compare your results, but you can export the data to a spreadsheet to make this easier.

Analyzing your results

After you’ve run your test using the two email variations, you will need to look through the results. Some of the parameters of interest might be the open rates, click through rates and conversions rates for those that visit the website.

Your interest in the open and click-through rates is obvious, but why would you want to track conversion rates in the website? Isn’t it beyond the reach of the email campaign?

Well, that’s both true and untrue.

In the ideal setting, your email shouldn’t impact the conversion rates once a subscriber comes to your site. However, if one variation has click-through rates of 10 percent and the other 15 percent, you’d expect to see that the second variation also results in 50 percent more conversions.

It doesn’t always work out like that. This is why it’s important to check the third parameter, as it will prove whether or not your email messaging is consistent with your website message. If your website doesn’t echo what’s on your email, visitors may get peeved or confused and leave.

Conclusion

Now you have a complete guide to carrying out an accurate A/B test. The following are some best practices to keep in mind:

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Jack Dawson has been a web designer and internet marketer for over ten years, working with many businesses to improve online marketing strategies. Click here to learn more about How To Choose Right Web Design Agency and other information.

Great Post Jack. A/B Testing tools are great to measure your campaign effectiveness. I personally do it for my email marketing. However I would definitely work on your suggestions and tips above. Thanks again for writing such a detailed and informative post.

Jack Sir, Thanks for your great and detailed post about email marketing strategies. Really, To make our business successful we should follow this strategy. And its given by you, so a big thanks to you sir.

Very elaborating post indeed. Email marketing is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog, as it says “the money is on the list.” Properly utilizing email marketing can instantly turn your blog from fresh to pro.

Thank you for this very nice post. I’ve learned a lot from your article. I will surely apply this in launching email marketing campaign to boost customer engagement and loyalty and to drive more traffic to my website.